WOMEN - World View On Gender Equality

"Where do American women stand in gender equality?" PBS Newshour 11/2/2013

Excerpts

SUMMARY:  The World Economic Forum published a report recently that says the United States finishes far from the top of a list when it comes to gender equality.  American women finished 23rd on the list of 136 countries.  Kathleen Gerson, a Sociology professor at New York University sheds light on the findings.

HARI SREENIVASAN (Newshour):  The World Economic Forum published a report recently that says the United States finishes far from the top of a list when it comes to gender equality.  According to the reports, women fared based in Iceland, Finland, Norway and Sweden.  American women finished 23rd on the list of 136 countries.  For more perspective earlier I spoke with Kathleen Gerson.  She is a Sociology professor at New York University and the author of a book about gender and family titled 'The Unfinished Revolution.'
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HARI SREENIVASAN:  In educational attainment we are tied for first with about 24 other countries but when it comes to the specific measure of healthy life expectancy we are fifty-third.  And that’s much lower than one would think living in the US.

KATHLEEN GERSON:  It’s very counterintuitive since we talk all the time about our high life expectancies especially for women.  But I think that that the lesson here is we are quite obviously one of the few, the only industrial wealthy country in the world that doesn’t have a national health system, and I think that is showing up in these statistics.  That we like to think of ourselves as being one of the healthiest countries on earth but in fact when you put it all together, people at the top may be doing well but we’re not as a country doing that well compared to other societies.

HARI SREENIVASAN:  Another one of the categories that they measure is economic participation and opportunity, we ranked sixth overall because we do have leadership positions that are filled by women but we ranked sixty-seventh when it came to wage inequality (misspeak? wage equality?), and that’s a conversation that has been happening in the US for a long time.